Dear people of Greece!
We, the pensioners, the doctors, the police officers, the teachers and your other ordinary fellow european citizens of Latvia are so delighted to hear that you demand european solidarity!
We’re sure that you’ll be happy to discover, that you’ve finally found new allies – us! So let’s change Europe together!
The average pension in Greece is €800. The average pension in Latvia is €300. The Average salary in Greece is €820 Netto, the average salary in Latvia is €600 Netto. And by the way, Latvia is a northern country, we have a thing called ‘heating season’ here, when temperatures fall below -10°C, and utility bills rise by €150 a month.
So, wouldn’t it be wonderful, if you could kindly share 1/3 of your pensions, taxes and salaries with us? It’s our democratic choice, so please respect it! We all want it. After all, we are one european family…
Except that we never borrowed the money that we couldn’t pay back to blackmail our creditors with suicide later, and to blame them for failed policies of our national government that we voted for. Our debt to GDP ratio doesn’t exceed 40%. During the financial crisis, we had managed to bail out our banks and return to pre-crisis levels after 4 years of “Troika-imposed” austerity, that helped us complete important structural reforms and get our economy grow faster than anywhere in Europe! And guess what, before we joined the European Union and the Euro, we were much poorer than we are today, because after 50 years of eastern european ‘”solidarity” in the USSR we forgot what it means to be competitive. We forgot how to manufacture anything that could compete in a free market, but we’ve learned. We’ve learned that you shouldn’t spend more than you earn. And if you need to borrow money, at least have the decency to admit that it’s not a gift and should be returned. We never lied about our public debt when we joined the Euro, and we never had the need to unpeg our national currency from the euro, before or after we joined it.
Get your act together. Have the decency to admit the mistakes of your democratically elected governments that they’ve been making for decades. Don’t blame Europe for not giving you free cash (writing off the debt). Yes, it would have been better if some debt were written off, but it’s not for the one who owes the debt to decide. And if you want your creditors to do more to help you – they will, if you’ll respect them, if you’ll recognize their free right to do so, and if you’ll show the results and the political will to change Greece to make it competitive and growing again. Vote Yes.
Greece is Europe. Europe is Greece.